No laughing matter
Sharing a UFO sighting is never easy, says JENNY RANDLES, especially if you’re a comedian
It’s never easy explaining to someone that you have just seen a UFO. Most people will assume that you are telling a tall tale, though in my experience with hundreds of witnesses over the years, that is rarely true. Now imagine how much more difficult it is if you are not, say, a doctor or a policeman, but a comedian. Very funny – tell me another! Except, of course, you’re not delivering a one-liner but relating a genuine experience that you wish to share.
But such people do tell their stories. It is not rare for those in the public eye to witness a UFO – after all, seeing one is just a question of being in the right place at the right time, and there a lot of UFOs to be seen (most eventually identifiable, of course).
Perhaps it started with Jackie Gleason, the US comedian who starred in one of the first major TV sitcoms, The Honeymooners, which ran in various forms through the 1950s. He played a New York bus driver, having worked for real for another part of the city transit system. Gleason was fascinated by fortean phenomena, notably UFOs, and he had gathered a collection of every UFO book published, which he read late into the night. He even built a ‘fleet’ of houses in Peekskill, New York, that resembled flying saucers (he called the main one ‘mother ship’); one recently went on the market for $12 million. There have long been claims that his friendship with President Richard Nixon meant Gleason was privy to big secrets. These tales were shared by his wife, not Gleason himself. He allegedly told her what happened only because he was so dumbstruck and could not hide it from her, but he never confirmed nor denied the story up to his death in 1987.
If we are to believe it, Gleason played golf with Richard Nixon on 19 February 1973 in Florida, where they both had homes. They talked about UFOs. Hours after that golf game, the President allegedly showed up at Gleason’s home in the middle of the night and took him to nearby Homestead Airbase; here, Nixon showed him the battered remains of a UFO and some 2ft- (60cm) tall, bald-headed alien creatures recovered from the crash site and now secreted at the facility (see “The President, the Entertainer and the Aliens”, FT366:30-36).
Tales about cover-ups of an alien presence on Earth involving a disgraced president and a famous comedian will not be seen as proof of extraterrestrial life by many: a good legend perhaps, but a believable event? Actress and comedian Fran Drescher – best known for the 1990s TV sitcom The Nanny and the earlier Spinal Tap movie – caused a stir in 2012 by claiming that both she and her husband had small scars on their hands in much the same spot and that aliens were responsible. A joke you might think – her husband seemed unconvinced that ET matchmakers inspired their romance, suggesting a mundane cause for her blemish – but Fran apparently did have a UFO encounter to back up her story. One witness who recalled the same incident from the 1970s says it involved traffic on Queens Boulevard in New York coming to a standstill as a ‘mother ship’ and several ‘baby’ UFOs were seen moving across the sky. If this is what Drescher saw, it matches several other such cases later traced to mid-air refuelling exercises where military jets connected to a tanker plane are given top-ups in flight without the need to land. Having witnessed such an event, for many people the retelling of it can turn the misperception of an unusual aerial display into something much bigger as the memory is relived. UFO investigators are familiar with the problem of researching cases that occurred years earlier.
More recently, funny man and BBC game show host Jason Manford shared an encounter he had as a teenager in Manchester while playing with his younger brother. This story caught my attention as it happened in Whalley Range, where I went to school (as did Jason). Indeed, I lived a short walk from where the Manfords saw their UFO, and I edited early editions of Northern UFO News and started writing UFOs: A British Viewpoint there (co-author Peter Warrington also lived nearby). The incident occurred around the summer of 1995 when Jason was 14 and living in a council house where his family were struggling to survive (which is why he later took a job at the local Southern Hotel, where his showbiz career would begin). He and his brother Stephen (now a magician) saw a strange object in the south Manchester skies. Stephen freaked out as they watched it pass overhead; Jason helpfully suggested it might come back to look for him in his bedroom. Unfortunately, we know little else, other than that the object moved one way and then took off in the opposite direction as no aircraft could do.
1995 was an interesting year for UFO sightings in Manchester. On 6 January, a British Airways Boeing 737 heading to the airport from Milan reported a very near miss with one. This was an unidentified wedge-shaped object that flew past in “close proximity”. The case provoked a major investigation, but only the cockpit crew saw the object. I suspect it was a large fireball meteor far above them. The sky was overcast and nobody on the ground would have seen it. The control tower at the airport confirmed that only the Boeing was on radar.
Closer in time to when the Manford boys saw their UFO, there was a wave of activity between 8 and 13 July. The secret MoD files on these events are now declassified. Something not dissimilar to what the Manfords saw was reported to the airport near Baguley Hall as a stationary object which then moved off at speed around midnight on 9 July. Baguley is 4km (2.5 miles) south of the Manford home, across the Chorlton marshes over the River Mersey. This object was mushroom-shaped and acted similarly to what the Manfords reported. Earlier that day in Newton, near Hyde, a man walking his dog saw another glowing object that he said was standing still and then accelerated away, making his dog’s hair stand on end. He added: “I had NOT been drinking!” Even more remarkably the caller, who reported this event to Manchester Airport control tower, phoned back later to advise them that in the hours following he suddenly “had a dark suntan and white hair”. Remarkably, this aftermath is not unique, and I have looked into other very similar claims.
These events may or may not be connected in any way with what the Manford brothers saw, but if either of the witnesses happen to be reading this magazine – please do get in touch with us. You will find that we are a respectful audience.